Boot drive letter

[Guest]

Okay, this is pissin me off. Built a new computer, Windows decided it would
install on I for some stupid reason. I have no other hard drives in the
system, nor did I at install. I have found after research that this cannot
be changed, except by a reinstall of Windows, well, it was the freakin first
install that did this. For cryin out loud, I dont care for Windows 98 at
all, but at least you could choose what drive and directory you wanted your
install in. XP is so "user friendly" that they've taken out all of the
advanced install features which makes it more difficult to use. Anyone got
any ideas on how to stop this crap from happening, I have systems do this to
me all the time, end up on drive F or drive E, and in this latest case, drive
I of all things. If it can't choose C or let the person installin it choose,
at least use a decent letter like X for XP or P which is my preferred for
POS. I need not say any more.

 

[Dr Teeth]

During the install, setup shows you all the partitions/disks to which
you can *choose* to install XP.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

 

[Mike Hall - MS MVP Windows Shell/User]

Does you computer have a card reader as part of the hardware configuration?

 

[Dr Teeth]

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "Mike Hall - MS MVP

Does you computer have a card reader as part of the hardware configuration?

Sounds like he has one of those multi-reader jobbies with several
drive letters associated with it.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "Mike Hall - MS MVP


Sounds like he has one of those multi-reader jobbies with several
drive letters associated with it.

That's a fairly common situation. I has a combination diskette/multi-card
reader drive here. The diskette drive gets the letter A: and the card reader
slots get C:, D: and E: As a result, Windows gets installed on the first
available letter, F:

This no problem at all, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't care in the
slightest that it's not on C: It works perfectly normally on F:

 

[Dr Teeth]

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "Ken Blake, MVP"

This no problem at all, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't care in the
slightest that it's not on C: It works perfectly normally on F:

I'm with the OP, in spite of what you say it would drive me NUTS
<vbg>. Don't know why, but it would. I guess I'm just an old fashioned
type of "OS on C:\" type of guy.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "Ken Blake, MVP"


I'm with the OP, in spite of what you say it would drive me NUTS
<vbg>. Don't know why, but it would. I guess I'm just an old fashioned
type of "OS on C:\" type of guy.

Each to his own. It doesn't bother me at all.

 

[Pop`]

Each to his own. It doesn't bother me at all.

Interesting: Would it not confuse install programs which default to C: for
installs? Or is there a mechanism that auto chooses where the os is?

Pop

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Interesting: Would it not confuse install programs which default to
C: for installs? Or is there a mechanism that auto chooses where the
os is?

The default is a registry setting. Since Windows is installed on F, the
default is set to F: on installation of Windows. I've never had a problem.

I suppose there might be some dumb programs that just went to C: rather than
look at the registry setting, but worst case, you could easily override it
manually. But I don't remember even having to do that.

 

[Gene K]

Just exactly where is your Boot.ini file? Other parts of XP will operate
from Drive/Partition F but the Boot.ini file HAS to be On C (unless there
has been a change which I have missed). I don't believe any other
Drive/Partition is checked for those boot files (again unless something has
changed).
Gene K

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Just exactly where is your Boot.ini file? Other parts of XP will
operate from Drive/Partition F but the Boot.ini file HAS to be On C
(unless there has been a change which I have missed). I don't believe
any other Drive/Partition is checked for those boot files (again
unless something has changed).

Are you asking me? Please quote the message to which you are responding, so
your comments can be understood. It was only by chance that I even saw this
message.

Boot.ini is on F: It does *not* have to be on C:, and as far as I know
nothing has changed; it's always been that way.

As I think I pointed out earlier, there is no C: hard drive on this machine.
C: is a memory card slot.

 

[Alec S.]

Are you asking me?

I believe the question mark makes it pretty clear.

Please quote the message to which you are responding, so your comments can be understood. It was only by chance that I even saw

this message.

I understood the question just fine.

Boot.ini is on F: It does *not* have to be on C:, and as far as I know nothing has changed; it's always been that way.
As I think I pointed out earlier, there is no C: hard drive on this machine. C: is a memory card slot.

And that's why it works for you, but it won't work for most other people.


When the system powers up, the BIOS does it's checks and stuff, then reads the MBR from the first sector of the first hard disk, and
passes control to the boot loader specified in it. The boot loader is a file on the disk which loads the OS. In this case, the
boot loader is NTLDR, which in turn loads BOOT.INI from the same location as itself. BOOT.INI displays a menu, allowing the user to
pick which OS to load. If you pick XP, then it runs NTDETECT.COM which does some checks, gathers some info, then passes control to
nt*krn*.exe (located in the place specified in BOOT.INI) which loads Windows.

In Ken's case, F: is the first hard disk, so when the hard drive is read, the boot files are loaded from what is considered to be
drive F. (There's probably an option to make the hard drive take precedence over the card reader in the BIOS.) Drives C, D, and E
are not hard disks, so they are not read during the boot (unless another option has been set in the BIOS.) If however, he had no
card reader, and C, D, and E were simply other hard disk partitions, then yes, NTLDR and BOOT.INI must be located on the first
sector of the first drive ("C" if it's a Windows recognized partition format), for it to work, normally. Note, this is not the
absolute case however; for example, if another boot manager is present, you can leave NTLDR and BOOT.INI on another hard disk
partition, and have the boot manager pass to it there.

The point is, that A boot loader, manager, etc. *MUST* be located on the first physical sector of the first physical hard drive
(0x80), for the system to boot because that's how the BIOS is written (presumably, the EFI will continue this practice.) So you're
both partly right. Of course we're talking about booting from a hard drive; naturally, you can choose to boot from a floppy, CD,
ZIP, network… After you've got some sort of boot program running, the rest (the OS-specific boot files) can be anywhere, including
on another system, Hell they can on another planet. (Speaking of another system, like I mentioned, you can set up the BIOS to boot
from the network and bypass the local system altogether; or at least you used to be able to, I'm not sure if that's still an option
since I haven't seen it in a long time.)


I trust this clears things up.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I believe the question mark makes it pretty clear.

The question mark made it clear that it was a question. Who he was asking
was not at all clear, which is why I asked. The way to have made it clear
was by quoting the message to which he was responding, as is standard
netiquette.

 

[Alec S.]

The question mark made it clear that it was a question. Who he was asking
was not at all clear, which is why I asked. The way to have made it clear
was by quoting the message to which he was responding, as is standard
netiquette.

The post had enough information for a proper reply, so it fits netiquette, but you're right that it didn't mention who it was
directed to. In that case, it should be assumed to be directed to the author of the message to which they are replying, or if using
a newsreader that does not organize posts in a tree format, then to the audience at large (the post could have been viewed as a
general question to the Internet community.)

Quoting is good, but a lot of people go overboard and full-quote (which is Hell for people who are still on dial-up). It's best to
strip signatures, salutations, editorials, and other non-essential material. It's also best to break up a quote if replying to
pieces of it. Bah, you're already familiar with some netiquette guidelines, and the people who need to learn it won't bother
learning it here (or anywhere probably). I just wish that OE didn't suck so hard when it comes to making replies. :|